Mark Twain on Honest Men in Congress

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From The Gilded Age – Why, it is telegraphed all over the country and commented on as something wonderful if a congressman votes honestly and unselfishly and refuses to take advantage of his position to steal from the government.

A Tramp Abroad –There is where the deep ingenuity of the operatic idea is betrayed. It deals so largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously augmented by the contrasts. A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere. – A Tramp Abroad

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Letter to Rev. J. H. Twichell 1904 – It is interesting, wonderfully interesting–the miracles which party-politics can do with a man’s mental and moral make-up. Look at McKinley, Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotless in character; honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning trickeries, treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of the meanings of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the condoning of crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public political life the reverse of all this. – Letter to Rev. J. H. Twichell 1904